Characterization of AGIPD1.0: The full scale chip

Abstract

The AGIPD (adaptive gain integrating pixel detector) detector is a high frame rate (4.5MHz) and high dynamic range (up to 104 ·12.4keV photons) detector with single photon resolution (down to 4keV taking 5σ as limit and lowest noise settings) developed for the European XFEL (XFEL.EU). This work is focused on the characterization of AGIPD1.0, which is the first full scale version of the chip. The chip is 64×64 pixels and each pixel has a size of 200×200μm2. Each pixel can store up to 352 images at a rate of 4.5MHz (corresponding to 220ns). A detailed characterization of the AGIPD1.0 chip has been performed in order to assess the main performance of the ASIC in terms of gain, noise, speed and dynamic range. From the measurements presented in this paper a good uniformity of the gain, a noise around 320 e− (rms) in standard mode and around 240 e− (rms) in high gain mode has been measured. Furthermore a detailed discussion about the non-linear behavior after the gain switching is presented with both experimental results and simulations.